


like the dead grown old

by idekman



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Post-Civil War, Recovery, bucky and steve are deeply in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 00:59:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10628859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idekman/pseuds/idekman
Summary: “When Stark tears through his arm like it’s tissue paper, it feels like dying all over again.No. That’s not right.It feels like the shards of memory rattling around his brain – the ones that crawl frost across his body, the phantom pains of an arm trapped under a rock, of cutting through his tendons with a pen knife, of the coppery stench of blood and rotten flesh and pain that is raw and electric."Tony won’t stop digging up information about the Winter Soldier. Bucky and Steve decide to fill him in.





	

The problem is, it’s sort of like picking at a scab.

He knows it’ll hurt, and he knows that he should stop pulling up dead skin with his fingernails, but he can’t stop himself. 

Except the picking is in the act of google searches and trawling through wikileaks and info dumps and hacking into any sort of source he can get his hands on and, finally, when he makes it through all of that too, he starts digging up paper files too. 

Rogers calls him three weeks in.

 

‘Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you, Captain.’ He’s aware how cold it sounds. Aware that the title sounds like an insult. His throat feels impossibly tight. Someone shuffles in the background on the other end of the line and something curls up in his stomach, horrid and acidic. 

‘Stark.’ All-business. ‘Whatever you’re looking for, just…’ A pause. A breath. Rogers sounds shaky. In the background, the shuffling stops – as if someone had been walking past and come to a rest. ‘Just stop.’

The problem is, _the problem is_ , he thinks, is that he’s not sure what he’s looking for at all. Just knows that he can’t stop.

Rogers tacks on a little _please_ just before he hangs up. It sounds broken in two.

\--

When Stark tears through his arm like it’s tissue paper, it feels like dying all over again. 

No. That’s not right.

It feels like the shards of memory rattling around his brain. The ones that crawl frost across his body, the phantom pains of an arm trapped under a rock, of cutting through his tendons with a pen knife, of the coppery stench of blood and rotten flesh and pain that is raw and electric. 

He allows himself to be numb, on the floor of that base. He stares out at the snow, feels the razor wire tang of shredded nerves and the odd taste of metal that somehow overwhelms him, his synapses lost and confused at what sensations he should be feeling. At one point, he thinks he grabs at Stark’s ankle – enough to distract him, snatch Steve a few spare seconds, perhaps. He’s not sure, later, if he dreamed it.

He manages to keep it together until they get to the jet. Until Steve’s buckled him in, hands ever-so soft. Shaking so hard that it takes him three attempts to get the buckle in.

It’s when Bucky moves to help him, when he makes an aborted lurch with his left arm and looks down to see it’s not there – that’s when it comes to him. That’s when he puts his right hand – his live hand, his only hand, flesh and blood and a little cold at the fingertips – to his mouth and screams through the gaps. That’s when Steve rests his forehead against his and tells him _breathe, breathe with me_ , forces his hand up onto the blue softness of his uniform, breathes with him, for him, even as tears roll off his chin and into the conclaves of Bucky’s neck, his lap, one across his knuckles. 

When Stark starts digging around three months later, the two of them holed up in some flat they haven’t left in six days, it is immediately obvious. Steve’s angry, because Steve is always angry about something. He just feels a little flat, and quite tired, falls asleep on the sofa half-watching some old movie. When he wakes up again a few hours later, Steve is curled up beside him, head just barely resting on his shoulder, warmth coming from him in waves. Bucky traces a thumb across the shadows resting beneath his eyes and goes back to sleep.

\--

He thinks he might just be looking for an answer to the eternal _why_ that winds round and round his head, looking for a way to get to get it all to be a little quiet when it’s three am and he hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours and his entire body feels like a livewire, taut and aching and old. 

It starts off with his parents. Of course it does. Hydra wanted the serum. No witnesses remaining.

It’s too simple. It doesn’t satisfy the itch at the pit of his skull. He digs deeper.

\--

The problem is, the more Stark finds, the more he sees, the more everyone else sees it too. 

It’s not as if the guy’s livetweeting everything he manages to haul from the dark recesses of the internet, but once he’s de-encrypted certain files, or broken past certain walls, it opens the flood gates. 

It starts off small. A YouTube video that gets taken down within thirty minutes. Odd, off-the-wall conspiracy websites chattering. 

And then it swells, and swells, and he wakes up to the sound of his screams vibrating through the wall. 

For a moment, he thinks it must be coming from him – it’s not unusual, one or the other of them waking up to find their throats cracked and raw with it. But he opens and closes his mouth, clears his throat, puts his fingers to his throat to see if he can feel the vibration. Nothing. 

He stumbles, bleary and half-awake, to the next room. Steve isn’t even sitting – he’s stood, every inch of him immobile. 

Bucky forces himself to look at the television screen for a little while.  
He remembers this. In patches. But yeah – it was early on, before the chair, before he realised that he wouldn’t die no matter how much pain they put him through. After they stopped pulling his fingernails out one by one, but before they started shredding the soles of his feet for kicks.  

This had been – there’d been blood in his mouth and in his eyes and he couldn’t remember what they were actually, physically, doing to him, but it had felt like they were peeling the skin off of him and pouring acid into the wounds.  
He stops looking at the screen. Stops being able to stand, really, falls before Steve can catch him, face wet and curled into something he’s never seen on him before. Later on – later, he’ll parse it through and realise it was agony and fury rolled up into one. Now, he can still hear himself screaming and it’s four o clock in the _god damn morning_ and the news is bleating _viewer discretion is advised_ and _graphic images_ and he’s on the floor, Steve sobbing into the soft juncture where his neck meets his shoulder.

That’s the day Steve calls Stark.

\--

He wants to stop, after he sees it on the news. Not for the Soldier, necessarily. For Steve.

Problem is, _problem is_ , he can’t. Picking a scab.

He always was a glutton for self-torture.

\--

‘We could just send him everything,’ Bucky heaves out, two months later. They’ve stopped watching the news. Steve punched a hole through television.  
He pauses, fork caught halfway between his plate and his mouth, to stare across at Bucky. When he breathes, it’s quaky and sharp.

‘What?’ 

Bucky shrugs. Twiddles his fork. Suddenly, he’s not so hungry.

‘I have everything. Everything on me, I mean.’

Steve’s staring at him like he’s just been punched in the face. 

‘What, like –’ he clears his throat. ‘Like the stuff on the news.’

Bucky can feel his face flitter before he can stop it, forming an expression that says _worse than what’s on the news_ , and Steve stands up so fast his chair clatters to the floor. For a moment, Bucky thinks about standing too because Steve jerks, kind of oddly – flinching, Bucky realises. Delayed response.  
When Steve comes back ten minutes later, he picks up his chair. All delicate and slow. 

‘Did you,’ Steve starts up, painfully careful – and then breaks off, swipes a big hand across his face, doesn’t pull away when Bucky picks up his free hand, tilts his fingers across the lines of his palm, the sensitive skin of his inner wrist. ‘Did you watch it?’

Bucky nods.

It had been excruciating. 

There were hours of it – Zola had insisted on recording almost everything he did – it had taken days. There hadn’t been much to do in between D.C. and Bucharest besides torture himself. 

‘Where –’ but then Steve is already cutting himself off, his voice a crackle of realisation. ‘The rucksack.’

He nods, feels his hair twitch into his eyes. Leaves it until Steve looks up and, fingers still trembling, pushes it behind his ears before him. Not that he can’t do it himself, just likes the way Steve’s fingertips brush against his temples. Steve nods.

 

Bucky goes out for coffee three days later, gets chatting with the barista like he isn’t an internationally-wanted fugitive. Gets waylaid at the market, swipes a trinket he thinks Steve might enjoy, in his pocket in the space of a blink. Goes back and tucks ten dollars into the space where it had sat a few minutes later, because Steve hates it when he steals. 

In all, it takes him an hour or so to wander back to the apartment, two stone-cold coffees in hand. He bumps clumsily through the doorway, having struggled with his key for about ten minutes, trawls in shouting out something about _I’ll have to heat it up in the microwave_ – trails off when he sees Steve.

Steve, on the sofa, laptop shut but headphones still plugged in. Steve, hands covering his face, shoulders shaking something fierce. 

A little memory stick pokes out of the side of the laptop.

He should be cross.

Steve is sobbing.

He _really_ should be cross. 

But he knows exactly how far Steve had gotten. Ten minutes in. The point where Bucky’d had to shut his own laptop and scream into the well of his fists and then sleep for sixteen hours straight, hoping against hope that he just wouldn’t wake up. 

Except he had, and he’d kept watching, and nothing after that, that ten-minutes-in moment, had been as bad. 

He kneels in front of Steve and presses a hand to the back of his neck, lets him know that he’s there. The little twitch under his palm tells him Steve feels him, that he won’t freak out as he pulls his earbuds out, tugs and tugs until his hands come away from his face.

‘C’mon, Stevie,’ he says, whisper-soft, the same kind of soft he’d used for when Steve was a foot shorter, all warm skin and ribcage, when he’d gotten beaten so hard he couldn’t get back up again. ‘S’ok. I’m here, I got you –’ he’s burbling, incoherent, just wants the horrible keening noise Steve’s making to stop. He pulls him close, lets him burrow into his neck. Feels Steve pull himself into the lines of his sternum, the press of his elbows, until they’re almost one whole person, pushed so tightly into the sofa they might as well disappear into it.  

\--

Steve calls him. 

‘Can you stop? If – if we show you all of it? Everything we have? Will that help?’

Steve sounds like lead. He sounds as if he’s died. There’s that ever-present shuffle in the background, and Steve’s _we_ and he realises – it’s the Soldier. In the background. A pot clangs softly. The click of a kettle. _Domestic_. 

‘It can’t hurt,’ Tony sends down the line, and the little, exhausted scoff he gets back makes his stomach lurch.

 

Ridiculously, Rogers refuses to post the damn thing.

He’s expecting boxes and boxes of stuff, but when Rogers unfolds himself from a far-too small car, he’s holding a tiny god-damn _envelope_.

‘That’s it?’ 

‘That’s it.’ Rogers looks, as usual, infuriatingly and implacably calm – but there’s a tic in his jaw that Tony can at least commend himself for.

‘Christ, this is what you made me drive all the way down to Philly for?’ Tony snaps, tearing open the envelope and letting the memory stick fall into the palm of his hand. ‘You just wanted a little Deep Throat moment?’

Rogers blanches at that, opens his mouth to protest – but there’s a little movement out of the corner of his eye, and –

\--

Bucky watches Stark watch him and he shuts his eyes and he’s back on the ground, arm searing and electric and he’s screaming through his teeth and his hands on the jet and he’s on an operating table in Wakanda as they smooth off the arm and he wakes up early, too early, from the anaesthetic, they underestimated his botched version of the serum and his recovery times, and – _and_ –

\--

‘You brought him here?’

A breath spools out of Rogers all at once.

‘Tony.’ The name is a plea, the informality of it unfamiliar, and for a second they could be back on that helicarrier, back when the most complex thing they had to worry about was Loki who, in all honesty, feels like peanuts in comparison to this tangled mess of a thing they’ve all ended up in. ‘He hasn’t let that thing out of his sight in two years. Give him a break.’

He feels his jaw clenching on autopilot, feels that same anger rear into his throat like bile –  _give him a break? He killed my mother, give him a break, I_ – forces himself to swallow it down. He nods, once, jerkily.

‘Call me when you’re done with it,’ Rogers tells him coldly. Pauses, then relents. ‘Take your time with it. We’ll be here until you’re ready.’

Tony nods. Feels his heart thrum in his chest, has no idea what it will help, or how, but hopes it soothes the unnameable  _something_ in his chest nonetheless. He looks down at the ground, at his shoes, one of the laces loose, at the memory stick in his hands, until he hears the click of the car door and, after a delayed moment, the rumble of the engine as they pull away.

\--

When Steve gets in the car, the first thing he does is lean over the gear stick and press a kiss to the sharp corner of his jaw.  
It helps, somehow.

\--

He gets ten minutes in.

\--

Three a.m. and someone’s knocking on the door of the crummy motel room they’ve rented out.

He’s barely awake and he thinks maybe Steve had slipped out for some ice, so disorientated that he doesn’t even realise Steve’s warm, sleeping body is back in the bed until the door’s halfway open.

Tony Stark stands in front of him.

He rears back as if Bucky had just slapped him, at around the same time Bucky flinches – and it had been bad, to see him in the car from thirty paces away, but this is worse, to see those dark eyes staring across at him, to feel the familiar presence and stockiness of him. The stump of his arm throbs with phantom pain. The way he curls in on himself is immediate and humiliating.

The tiny, keening gasp that peels out of him is enough to wake Steve up. He can hear the jolt of him, watches Stark peer over his shoulder, blanche at something. The shared bed, Bucky realises. Bucky shirtless, Steve hauling himself out of bed in just his underwear, calling out his name – soft, always so soft, _Buck?_ , confused and hurt until he realises that Bucky hasn’t run away, is just distant for a moment. But it’s always the same, the same presumption of abandonment that socks Bucky in the stomach with the ache of it, that Steve thinks he would leave him now, after all of this.    

 _‘Tony?’_ Steve slurs out, blinking across at the doorway. 

‘I’m just going to –’ _have a panic attack. Scream. Tear my skin off._ He leaves the sentence jagged and escapes into the bathroom, snapping the orangey overhead light on as he glares in the mirror. He looks like death.

\--

The memory stick is a weight in his palm. 

‘That was fast,’ Rogers tells him dryly. Tony swallows past the lump in his throat, tries to speak. For perhaps the first time in his life, he can’t think of a quip for this. ‘How far did you get?’

Rogers is leaned against the door frame, had taken Barnes’ place immediately, brushing an arm across the crook of his elbow as they passed on another, a sort of quiet intimacy Tony isn’t sure he’ll ever understand. But now he looks – he looks faux-casual and _furious_ , jaw clenched around something tangible and Tony, because he is Tony, spits out;

‘Well, you know. I got to the point where he starts screaming your name and I was pretty much out after that.’

\--

He’s never quite sure if what he remembers is the memory or the recording filling in the blanks. But he remembers the coldness of the chair’s restraints on the inside of his wrists, remembers how they’d clamped metal to each side of his face and he’d thought that it could never get more painful than that, that it was the worst he’d ever felt and the worst he ever would.

Something had knocked loose in his head that day – something they spent a very time burning out of him afterwards. But the name had curled around his ribcage and his lungs and his oesophagus, and he remembers them scrambling to turn the camera off. Even after they’d stopped sending electricity through his synapses he’d still screamed it, over and over until his throat was raw enough that he’d coughed up blood. He didn’t stop, couldn’t, not even when they kicked him until his chest was black and blue and he was just wheezing it, barely a sound but the instinct still there, not even when they threatened to tear his tongue out. They’d had to sedate him, eventually. 

That was the first time he’d gone in the chair. It was a good, long time until they put him in it again.

\--

He’d expected a rise out of Rogers. Expected horror, or at least anger. He gets a touch of irritation, but most of it is just sorrow, settling like lead across Rogers’ features. 

‘You knew?’ Rogers’ gaze flicks to something over his shoulder. There’s nothing there, Tony realises; just doesn’t want to meet his gaze. ‘You – you’ve seen it.’  
He gets a nod in response.

‘Got about as far as you did,’ he murmurs. Deliberately, something rattles in the bathroom. Rogers’ voice lowers so that it’s barely above a whisper. ‘Felt disrespectful, after that.’ 

Tony nods. He’d felt something of that too.

It had quelled the itch. He’s not sure if it had just replaced it with something worse, enough fuel for his nightmares to last the rest of his life, but the urging need to rid that strange, unsatisfiable  _something_ is absent, now. 

He presses the memory stick into his hand. 

‘Just tell him…’ He trails off. Starts again; ‘just tell him –’

\--

Stark and Steve’s voices vibrate through the walls and he’s abruptly, irrationally furious.

He moves slowly, though, calm as he opens the door, watches Stark cut himself off with a little flinch. He goes to the doorway, doesn’t look at Stark – can’t - 

(because as much as he wants, desperately, and with all every inch of his skin, to apologise, he can’t. Too scared. Not of – of apologising. Just of Stark. Every time he meets his eye he’s being flung across the room by a repulsor beam, having a limb torn from him.)

He looks to Steve instead. 

Steve, because he is everything more than he deserves, switches into a different person somehow. Becomes loose-limbed and kind as he pulls Bucky a fraction closer, presses a kiss to his forehead and murmurs _go back to bed_ into his temple, the thumb dragging across his jaw effusing warmth through his entire body. He stumbles away.

\--

Stark watches as the Winter Soldier crawls back into bed. 

The little room is cluttered, shoes and clothes abandoned on the floor. Empty take out containers are stacked up neatly by an already-full bin. Two dog-eared books sit on the night-stand; _Pride and Prejudice_ and some thick history book that must be Steve’s. There’s a thick leather jacket draped over a chair, the smell of lime shower gel, as if someone’d had a shower before they got into bed, a softer tang of sweat –

He has no idea why he came here. Intruding, so messily and so noisily, on such a precarious bubble of intimacy. 

Steve waits for him to speak. When he doesn’t, he offers;

‘I’ll see you around, Tony.’

Tony nods. Gives him a mock-salute. Tries not to glance over his shoulder to where the man who killed his parents is sleeping in polkadot-print pyjama pants.

‘Night, Steve.’

He turns away. The door click shuts.

\--

Steve hauls himself into bed with a long sigh. Bucky tucks an arm around his waist and goes back to sleep.  

**Author's Note:**

> 2018 EDIT:  
> THE FACT THAT SOMEONE TOOK THE TIME TO WRITE IN AND REC THIS ON THE STUCKY LIBRARY WHEN ITS AN OLD ASS FIC THAT I WROTE IN SOME BIZARRE STATE AT TWO AM IS SO FUCKING NICE if it was u hmu. 
> 
>  
> 
> this was meant to be a drabble but classic me i ended up writing 3000 words in a weird 2 am haze. au i guess cause bucky doesn't stay in wakanda. 
> 
> continuing my tradition on only using titles based on the lyrics of bad pop songs. 
> 
> hit me up on my usual [writing blog](http://idekman-ao3.tumblr.com/) (I AM LITERALLY ALWAYS TAKING FIC PROMPTS PLEASE SEND THEM TO ME) or my regular [blog](http://judest-francis.tumblr.com).


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